What is DDos attack?
By Elmalla A. on December 12, 2017
Originally written for i-Awcs.
What is DDos effect on your web site ?
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack where the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.
A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door or gate to a shop or business, and not letting legitimate parties enter into the shop or business, disrupting normal operations.
Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks or credit card payment gateways. Revenge, blackmail and activism can motivate these attacks.
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What is top reasons for using a CDN ?
The number one reason for using a CDN is to improve your user’s experience in terms of speed, and as we know – speed matters!
Ensuring a consistent experience for all your users is important. A website may be hosted in a particular region, but have the majority of its users coming from an entirely different region – for example, if your site is hosted in North America, GTmetrix might report fast speeds based on our default test location, but if a good chunk of your users come from Europe, their speed will not be as fast as you experience it to be.
A global CDN would allow users from a European point of origin to download static content from a closer source. Instead of spanning the Atlantic ocean to retrieve data, they can connect to a server in say, London, UK, to get the same data. This reduces latency and provides a faster loading of your website.
CDNs not only ensure a faster experience to your users, but they also help to prevent site crashes in the event of traffic surges – CDNs help to distribute bandwidth across multiple servers, instead of allowing one server to handle all traffic. Start Here
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Pulse wave DDoS is a new attack tactic, designed to double the botnet’s output and exploit soft spots in “appliance first cloud second” hybrid mitigation solutions.
Comprised of a series of short-lived bursts occurring in clockwork-like succession, pulse wave assaults accounted for some of the most ferocious DDoS attacks we ever mitigated.
Reading this white paper will help you:
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Incapsula History
Incapsula was founded in 2009 by Gur Shatz and Marc Gaffan. The company originally operated under the company Imperva (NYSE:IMPV), an American-based cyber security company who owned 85% of the company. It was spun out from Imperva in 2009 and reported to be growing at a rate of 50% per quarter as of August 2013. In February 2014 Imperva bought the remaining part of Incapsula and it became a product line within the parent company.
Incapsula was attributed with protecting against one of the Internet's largest attacks on a website as of October 2013. The attack was said to have lasted nine hours with 100Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. The attack was against BTC China, a bitcoin and yuan trading platform.
In December 2016 Incapsula revealed that it had again defended against its largest DDoS attack, peaking at over 650Gbit/s and 200Mpps.
Elmalla A. (@elmalla) is Chief Sales Officer at i-AWCS, which focuses on web application security solutions.